We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia, settled nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered by them through a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the traditions of the implement in question. Spitted by the railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and surrounded by a thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the mountains to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the corporate limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them, and a fine specimen of Felis Canadensis was killed in an orchard still nearer.
Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone carse swells into the shady hills, clad largely with pine, that form the long glacis of the Alleghanies. These hills are peopled principally by a hardy race not unlike the German woodsmen, whose blood, indeed, a great many of them share, as their surnames, though sadly thinned down into English spelling and pronunciation, denote. They inherit, likewise, their fancy for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand's supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it supplies them materially with sport and subsistence. Their land, where arable at all, being unproductive as a rule, wood-chopping is their most profitable branch of farming. A score or two of them drive into town daily, each with his four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The pile is frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse, there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow intervales in extraordinary numbers. We have seen three sledge-loads of hares—say two thousand in all—on the street of a winter's day.
This sappy and sapid contribution to its comfort and luxury the town often repays with a jug of whisky as an addendum to the cash receipts; although it must not be inferred from this that the hillmen are noted for a weakness in that direction. Generally, they are as sober as they are hard-working, independent and honest. The few who do take kindly to strong waters are so hardened by a life of toil and exposure that the enemy is a lifetime in bringing them down.. One little old hook-nosed fellow was an every-day feature of the road for fifteen or twenty years. In that entire period he was rarely, if once, seen to go out sober. He drove but two horses, which were apparently coeval with himself. Long practice had taught them perfectly how to accommodate themselves to their master's failing. The saddle-horse adapted his movements with vigilant dexterity to the rolling and pitching aloft. On more than one occasion the woodman was found lying in the road by the side or under the feet of his faithful and motionless team. Poor old Jack! thou hast "gone under," deeper than that, at last, leaving behind thee the savor of an honest name, slightly modified by that of corn whisky.
The Hayfield Inn, a little hostelrie on the Northern "pike," is the scene of many a turkey-shoot. Between the hill and the road, at the foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles, room enough has been scooped out, partly by the rains and partly by the pick, for the house, offices and microscopic yard decorated with hollyhocks and larkspurs. Across the highway stands a capacious barn, with open space for wagons, and between it and the brook beyond stretches a narrow meadow, whence a vivid imagination has extracted the name of the caravanserai. The open space flanking the house and road is the rifle-course, so to speak. When occupied of a mellow October afternoon by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets of blue or hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery spectacle. Festooning fence and tree around them, the Virginia creeper, or Ampelopsis, shames vermilion against the mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond. Other tints of vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from side to side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain. Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature's stage-decorations. One group will be mentally weighing the turkeys, another discussing the distance—too long or too short for the peculiar powers of this or the other individual or his weapon. Around the rude target kneel two or three, scoring on it each man his "centre," above or below, to the right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the ascertained obliquity of his eye or his gun. Here a six-foot Stoic, the Nestor of the glen, is very formally going through the ceremony of loading. Another is slowly, and with the precision of an astronomer, adjusting the tin slides which protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun. The chatter of a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way. The horses whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand "hard by their chariots champing golden corn," like the horses of Nestor, Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann's Troy; the yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze; the guinea-fowl now and then honors the shout over a good shot with its harsh but well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at measured intervals; the prizes thin off to the remainder gobbler; and so, with the quiet characteristic of rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew. The smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared for their rest as tenderly as infants. Dobbin is rescued from the (fence) stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering exultant or jogging grumly according to the result of the "event;" and the metropolis of Petticoat Gap—for such, in the vernacular and on the maps, is its unfortunate designation—relapses into virtuous repose.
The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its ground for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool. The essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist and will probably remain. Variations in the rifling and—where muzzle-loading is abandoned—in the appliances of the chamber will continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number numberless. The patterns now fashionable will give place to others, in their turn to be dropped like a last year's coat. Remington, Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers, devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron. With them will rise and fall a parallel series of names on a broader and more sonorous field—the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous Wiard being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled cannon certainly present problems far more complicated than the small-arm. They can by no means be considered, as yet, so near perfection. It is boldly maintained by many experts, both here and in England, that the "smashing" power at point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the Rodman 12-inch and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of the same weight. The question is so closely involved with that of armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and other naval requirements, and economy and stability on land, that a long period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed conclusions. Within the present generation wooden line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have ruled the wave. These have given place to the steam-liners that began and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is tolerably safe to say that where the best shooting is to be done it will continue to be done with the conico-cylindrical missile, spirally revolving around the line of flight; that is, with the arrow-rifle.
EDWARD C. BRUCE.
TWO MIRRORS.
My love but breathed upon the glass,
And, lo! upon the crystal sheen
A tender mist did straightway pass,